Category Archives: News

Congratulations to University of New Hampshire alum Tristan Amaral for publishing his first peer reviewed publication in theJournal of Glaciology. The paper features volunteer snow measurements collected by the CoCoRaHS-Albedo network, a project I launched during my Ph.D. in 2011. In 2014, I handed the reins off to Tristan who led the project for two years during his junior and senior year at UNH. Tristan’s new work demonstrates how citizen science data provide useful snow albedo, depth and density measurements and serves as an effective model for future measurement campaigns.

I now have a @github account: https://github.com/eaburakowski. The account will include repositories of bash, NCL, Matlab, and R scripts that I use to retrieve, process, analyze, and visualize data. Enjoy!

It’s been almost 30 years since I put on my first pair of skis and snowplowed my way down The Face at Suicide Six in South Pomfret, Vermont. In the mid-1990s, I took up snowboarding at our middle-school’s ski club held weekly at Pat’s Peak in
Henniker, New Hampshire. My 13-year old self would never believe that I’d grow up to become a climate scientist, let alone have the opportunity to share climate research with some of the most talented professional skiers and riders in the world. And yet last week I found myself invited to present at the Protect Our Winters Riders’ Summit at Squaw Valley.

I first met Jeremy Jones and Chris Steinkamp, co-founders of Protect Our Winters, in 2010 on a visit to Washington, DC. The trip stemmed from a short film by Teton Gravity Research in 2009 called Generations, which “humanizes the debate on climate change by exploring the fragility of winter and the intrinsic value of snow to people across generations and cultures.” In 2012, I led a report Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United Statespublished jointly with Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Most recently I accepted a position on POW’s Science Alliance science advisory board. We convened last week at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco to discuss research priorities among other topics.

As a lifelong winter sports enthusiast and climate scientist, I’d be challenged to find a better way to get involved in a grassroots community dedicated to initiating action on climate change. It was an honor to speak at the summit and to join the POW Science Alliance. Thanks to Jeremy, Chris, and POW supporters and partners for creating such a positive and effective community!

Today is my last day at the Mesa Lab and I wanted to share with you all a few of my favorite things here at the lab:

(1) The Dear NARC Letter outside the Mesa Lab cafeteria

We have numerous school groups, summer camps, and visitors to the Mesa Lab Exhibit Hall and sometimes they leave the most lovely thank you notes. This one was so touching that it has been framed and hung outside of the UCAR Center for Education office.

“Dear NARC”, a thank you note from Billy, Topher, and Winnie. Photo by Liz Burakowski.

The markers have faded a bit over the years, so I’ve reproduced the text below:

“Dear NARC,

We really liked our trip to to Tim’s lavboratory. We really liked the exhibits. The tornado was wicked cool, but it didn’t always work. Is this an example of a metastable dynamical system with insufficient damping? The prism things were really neat. Topher thought they were stupid, but that’s cause the quantum interference effect was too small to be observable. The zapper thing was O.K.

Signed,

Billy and Topher and Winnie

P.S. You should use a nonlinear filter, and 4th order viscosity in your C.S.M.

(2) The Ozone Garden

The Ozone Garden project at NCAR was spearheaded by my good friend and colleague, Dr. Danica Lombardozzi. She planted coneflower, milkweed, snap beans, and potatoes, four plants that respond visually to ground level ozone pollution. I hope to create one somewhere on the UNH campus (maybe James Hall? Morse?) next summer.

The Ozone Garden at the Mesa Lab in Boulder, Colorado. Photo by Liz Burakowski

(3) Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Division Ski Day

There’s a reason NCAR is also known as the National Center for Alpine Recreation. I’ve had the pleasure of attending three CGD Ski Days with some of the best scientist-skiers I’ve ever met. I was the lone snowboarder/splitboard for the first two years (Paul joined me the third year!) and I thank this marry band of skiers for welcoming me into their crew.

Today we’re wrapping up the 9th Annual Flux Course at the University of Colorado (CU) Mountain Research Station (MRS) in Nederland, CO. It’s been an amazing two weeks of eddy covariance (EC) measurements and theory, ecosystem modeling, data assimilation and opportunities to exchange ideas with some of the most important folks studying the exchange of mass and energy between the atmosphere and land surface.

Our journey up to Nederland was put on hold after some careless campers set fire to 600 acres of forest southwest of the MRS. While firefighters tirelessly combatted the fire, CU accommodated our large group of 35 graduate students, postdocs, and early career scientists at the main campus in Buolder.

A slurry bomber make a drop along a ridge near highway 119 in Nederland fighting the Cold Springs Fire July 10, 2016. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)

On campus a group of flux course participants learned how to set up three types of eddy covariance systems (closed path, open path, and enclosed path) and learned which systems are appropriate for different climates.

Setting up the closed path EC system at Williams Village, CU, Boulder, CO

Dr. Dario Papale introduced us to u* filtering (removing data during periods of low friction velocity) and gap-filling techniques to estimate missing net ecosystem exchange (NEE) data that was removed during u* filtering. He kindly shared code written in C for processing the u* filtering and gap filling, which I tested out on the UNH flux towers.

Dario Papale breaks down u* filtering for the class. Photo by Dave Moore.

After a week in Boulder, the Cold Springs Fire was fully contained and we were finally allowed up to the MRS for the second week of the course. We enjoyed an amazing ‘chalk talk’ with Dave Schimel (including the Diver Down plot, aka: Horrendigram). Rosie Fisher joined us from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and highlighted the newest features that will be revealed in the Community Land Model 5.0. Dennis Baldocchi’s fire side chat (minus the fire) was a great opportunity for us Flux Course students to have a casual conversation about careers, publications, social media, among many other topics. Many thanks to Dennis for taking the time to chat with me about aerodynamic temperature, land cover, LIDAR and wind tunnels.

On Wednesday, we found ourselves back down in Boulder with Andy Fox for a tour of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Thanks to everyone at NEON who gave us tours of the calibration/validation lab, the Airborne Observatory Platform, NEON’s citizen science initiatives (a passion of mine), and introducing us to the numerous data products NEON has to offer to the research community and public.

Flux Course participants at the NEON test tower in Boulder, CO. Photo by someone at NEON.

The last two days have focused on learning how to use the Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) with Mike Dietze, Betsy Cowdery, and Ankur Desai. I look forward to incorporating PEcAn into my course curriculum in the future and using this powerful tool for data assimilation and model parameter estimation in my research.

This post only scratches the surface of all of the amazing material we covered in the past two weeks. Check out #Fluxcourse on Twitter for more highlights. I look forward to keeping in touch with this wonderful group of talented scientists over the course of my career!

We used a WRF multi-physics ensemble to evaluate the impact of New England reforestation on surface climate. We found that the regrowth of forests in pastures and fields led to daytime warming of +0.5C to +3.0C. Greater daytime warming occurred during cold, snowy winters due an increase in albedo over snow-covered fields. At night, temperatures warmed in areas reforested with deciduous broadleaf forest but cooled in areas with evergreen needleleaf forest. The difference in nighttime temperature responses was linked to changes in ground heat flux. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how historical land cover changes have influenced long-term winter warming trends in New England.

While this study focused primarily on the influence of albedo, we know that other surface properties such as the Bowen ratio and canopy roughness also play a role explaining the difference in surface climate between forested and deforested lands. I have a paper in prep that will be exploring the relative contributions of albedo, Bowen ratio, and canopy roughness, so stay tuned!

I dug up my very first poster presentation from the 2007 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU.org) to use as an example of what not to do for science poster. The poster is over 9 years old and oh my did it need some helpful poster presentation tips. Check it out:

My first AGU poster, presented in 2007. Based on my Masters research, later published in JGR Atmospheres (Burakowski et al. 2008).

So much text! And such tiny text! Itty bitty figures! Too many typos and grammatical errors to count. Did I even proofread this thing?

Tune in tomorrow to the GLOBE webinar for teachers to see how I improved and revised the poster!